A new initiative to encourage more City professionals to take up charity chairmanships has been launched by the new Lord Mayor, Fiona Woolf, who is the second only female Lord Mayor since 1189.
Fiona Woolf, who today is taking office as the 686th Lord Mayor of the City of London, has launched the Lord Mayor’s Charity Leadership Programme.
The programme is a series of free events for city professionals and charity chairs designed to increase the number of charity chairs in the UK, and improve their effectiveness.
It is being run by the Lord Mayor’s Consort, Nicholas Woolf, with support from the Centre for Charity Effectiveness at Cass Business School, Mazars and the Macquarie Group Foundation, as well as the newly-set-up Association of Chairs, Trustees Unlimited and Coutts.
Nicholas Woolf designed the programme to reflect his own personal experience as chairman or vice-chairman of four healthcare charities. The events will include a series of ‘City Giving’ lectures from high-profile figures from the nonprofit and philanthropy world, debates, networking events and a conference.
Nicholas Woolf said: “There are few leadership programmes designed specifically for actual or potential charity chairs. It can be a lonely role and we wanted to use the mayoral year to provide an exciting programme that will bring people together to learn new skills and more effective ways of leading charities.”
“The programme is particularly pertinent for those wanting to extend their skills into another sector or who are nearing retirement and looking for new challenges and ways to redeploy their skills to the maximum benefit of the nonprofit sector.”
Speaking to civilsociety.co.uk, Nicholas Woolf said he would make sure that the programme would leave a legacy so it would not just last for the Lord Mayor one-year tenure. He also said that there was a gap in the market for supporting chairs, which he hoped to start addressing with the leadership programe.
The theme of Fiona Woolf’s mayoralty is “The energy to transform lives” and the charitable aspects embodied within this focus are all within the framework of the Lord Mayor’s Appeal.
